Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday February 04, 2012 @10:25AM
from the go-ask-louis-ck-how-to-do-things dept.

scottbomb writes "This is perhaps the best op-ed I've read about the whole SOPA/PIPA controversy. The author challenges Hollywood to re-think their entire business model. It will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, for now. But sooner or later, they will have no choice but to adapt. From the article: 'Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling.'"

If it's possible to make a movie and sell it cheaply online, with no DRM, and still make a profit as the article suggests why hasn't anyone done that successfully?

It's the distribution channel, my friend

Tell me, currently what are the distribution channel for movies, and how do they distribute them?

The distribution channel for physical goods was sailing ships, and in the early days of sailing ships (1400-1850ish) piracy was in its glory years, now pirates are marginalized by the power and pervasiveness of modern warships, and air pirates are almost non-existent.

The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been.

In the meanwhile, expect brutal but ineffective attempts to stop it by the commercial interests who perceive it as a threat (see: Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies for a fictionalized depiction of the basic human responses at work...)

Piracy rose to popularity because the sailor who did all the actual work were treated worse than unskilled farm laborers, and they could be pressed into the navy before they even got paid from their merchant ship tour, or just cheated out of their pay by the merchant captain. Serving a privateer promised at least a share of the plunder, but it was one share for the sailor compared to 14 or more for the captain. The famous pirates you hear about ran in democratic packs, electing their captains who only got one additional share, and voting on all important decisions. For many a life of piracy was better than the legal alternative. At least for a while.

This. Piracy is an indicator of a broken system and pissed off people. The only way to quell the piracy is to give the people what they want -- a good product at a fair price and at least the impression they are being treated fairly and are important customers. And since that's unlikely to happen, I don't see anything changing anytime soon.

Piracy is an economic problem. If people are stealing your shit then you are missing out on markets where they could be paying you for it(up until a point at any rate).

In Somlia Piracy started working because you could get a hostage of ship and crew and be paid millions of dollars for 6 months of work. As long as insurance companies keep paying the pirate problem there won't go away.

For media companies(music, video, news, books). the answer is simple people want to consume such stuff at a time, place and manner that they choose. The icon image of a woman jogging with a SONY Walkman, is hilarious when you stop and think something like 90% of joggers where listening to custom mix tapes that they dubbed off of other tapes, cd's, or from the Radio. People are very used to sharing music and video with their friends and neighbors. DRM is an attempt to stop that sharing. Piracy in many cases is doing just that.

The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.

> The RIAA completely misunderstood Napster. they saw money being lost not a chance at making more money. It took 6 years and one billion itunes downloads before they realized just how badly they fucked up.

The music companies were always screwed - it didn't matter what choices they made. Music revenues have done nothing but decline in the past 10 years. Saying that iTunes did it right is missing the fact that digital music sales have not compensated for the loss of physical sales. Mathematically speaking, for every $100 decline in physical music sales over the past ten years there has been an $18 increase in digital music sales. It's not a winning strategy. At best, it's making the best of a bad situation.

(Sorry, I get annoyed when people like to explain the music industry's decline as a result of "not moving to digital sales" when it seems like the real culprit was always what the music industry thought it was: a fast, global internet combined with piracy. The music industry was not wrong about Napster.)

I'd much more blame the "indestructible" CD then piracy. A LOT of the industry's revenue, especially the boom that came with CDs, was people re-buying music they already owned on yet-another-format.

Vinyl wasn't useful in cars (boom of 8 track), 8 track wasn't that useful walking around and self-destructed over time (boom of cassette tape and Sony's Walkman), all of them wore out over time and/or broke easily from being dropped.

Enter the CD... Never wares out, much more durable, as portable as most anyone would ever need, and for 99% of people sounds better then anything that came before. BOOM, there's a HUGE spike in CD sales as everyone is re-buying everything they ever wanted to keep on CD (along with new music sales, of course).

Enter digital...

It's everything the CD was and then some. But there's a problem... Unlike every other format change in the history of recorded music, no one is going to re-buy music they already have on CD as digital. They're just going to rip their own CDs. As a result the industry is left with only new music sales...

It isn't about piracy - It's about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It's about the Music Industry's ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream...and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.

---

That huge drop in sales? That's called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it...on a format they will effectively never replace again.

It's about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You'll always need to buy more toothpaste...but you'll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.

Don't ignore the fact that they are working in an almost saturated market. Look at how much of the industry income is from back-catalog and compilations. Since most everyone now has all they music they want in digital format (except new consumers - the Bieber fans), people aren't buying much any more. And when they are buying downloaded music, they may buy singles, not whole albums.

I don't think the analogy with 17th and 18th century piracy really fits. We're not talking about a few groups cracking DRM and selling the music. In fact, it's not like that at all. Most of the piracy, so it is called, isn't even for profit any more.

I don't think the analogy with 17th and 18th century piracy really fits. We're not talking about a few groups cracking DRM and selling the music. In fact, it's not like that at all. Most of the piracy, so it is called, isn't even for profit any more.

Bootlegging, then? A more populist revolt, to be sure, but, while I agree that RIAA, DMCA and all the related alphabet soup makes about as much sense as hanging pickpockets, and the "damage" done by IP theft is virtually impossible to quantify (and, that, in-fact some IP theft actually creates value for the "victim"), I believe that there is still some value to society in the concept of "Intellectual Property," and that some form of protection of that property is both warranted and just.

Today, I feel like the enforcement is akin to swinging a sledgehammer in a room thick with flies, ineffective at best, and horribly unjust to many of the punished. Kind of like being hung for associating with pirates of the high seas.

Even more so, nothing is lost. End result is that it is more sharing than stealing. If you could share a apple with someone hungry without loosing it, why would you refuse? Any sane person under those circumstances would stop trying to sell apples, unless they could provide some kind of scarce value add to the whole.

Even more so, nothing is lost. End result is that it is more sharing than stealing. If you could share a apple with someone hungry without loosing it, why would you refuse? Any sane person under those circumstances would stop trying to sell apples, unless they could provide some kind of scarce value add to the whole.

No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you. It's just not financially viable. The analo

No, if we seriously take that attitude, then if everyone pirated everything, creators would not be in a position to create entertainment for you.

Except that, as evidenced by the fact that movies available as DVD rips on The Pirate Bay subsequently make a non-zero number of DVD sales, that isn't what actually happens.

It's possible for people who have no money to get media for free and yet still have people who can afford to do so pay money to support the creation of new works. It is, in fact, what is happening today: A great many people pay, even though they have the option not to, because they support providing that incentive for artists to create future works.

As long as those people are providing a sufficient incentive, there is no problem. If it ever comes to pass that so few people are paying that artists decide to stop making new works, the pirates won't have enough material to pirate and the market will sort itself out: Either enough of the pirates who could afford to pay realize what is going on and decide to pay more so that more works are produced and the problem goes away, or artists will start demanding to be paid in advance and use crowd-sourced funding methods to raise money.

In theory you could have a market failure where not enough people pay to create new works (through any means) and new works then stop being created, but until that is what is actually happening there is no reason to implement extremely expensive countermeasures to fight a purely theoretical problem.

Odd thing is, a lot of people create entertainment for free during their spare time (a very modern concept in its own right). Consider the amount of time people have contributed to the *nix ecosystem simply because they have the time, knowledge and a itch to scratch? Also, why do the creator need to take on debt? Consider Kickstarter, where someone can put up a draft of what they hope to make and provide a means for a group fundraiser. Afterwards the production costs have been covered, the creator have created what he hoped to create and can then put it up for download for anyone interested. The cost of creation 1000 extra copies once the master have been finalized is basically zero these days, with torrents or similar it is the downloaders that are fronting the cost once a swarm is properly formed. It used to be that corporations have very specific task to perform and was dissolved once that task was performed. As such, the recording labels and studios are an artifact of a time when distribution and duplication was a very mechanical undertaking. This is no longer the case. Also, i wonder how many of the current generations have no familiarity with the backlog of creations that sit in some vault because the copyright duration have been continually extended. I keep finding as much in the decades past as i find in the present, but i am forbidden to legally partake because of the duration of a certain law.

The whole "victimless crime" thing is a distinction between IP theft and theft of physical goods. Just what constitutes IP is a far more ephemeral construct than a bar of gold or barrel of salted pork.

I was referring to the "gallant nobility" of Jean Lafitte, or Robin Hood, or any of the old (mostly romanticized and false) stories of persons operating outside the law as a manner of making a living. For a more realistic depiction of what it meant to operate outside the law in the "good old days," see: The Bounty [imdb.com]. Today's Somali pirates are certainly a much smaller fraction of the global commerce picture than the Privateers were 200 years ago.

As the internet, and the nodes that interface to it, mature with another century of experience, it will become increasingly difficult to freely trade "protected" information across it with impunity. A global consensus definition of "protected information" is one of the things that will have to develop before intellectual property will become more difficult to "steal" using the global network, but, even if there never is 100% agreement about just what is IP and what protection it deserves, you will see "blowback" from the interests that feel wronged against both the little guys who can't defend themselves and the big flamboyant pirates like Kim Dotcom [rollingstone.com].

The word what is actually applicable here is "theft" or "smuggling". Now tell me again, how theft/smuggling has ever been marginalized in the world "after some time", at any point in history.

Except it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. The only thing 'stolen' is an idea, i.e., 'intellectual property'. You know, an intangible. You can't see it, touch it, taste it, or piss on it. People have been selling intangibles for thousands of years. Just ask the Catholic Church. And they've made tons of money on them. Again, just ask the Catholic Church.

The cool thing about an intangible is, you don't need to produce anything to have it. The 'labor' and 'goods' come from the derivatives, like holy books, lunch boxes, posters, etc.

It should also be noted that the Boston Tea Party occurred partly because people refused to pay the unfair taxes imposed on goods.How do you think the copyright industry & their 'intellectual property tax' is seen around the world? One day the people will rise up and end the greed.

The fiber just got laid 10-15 years ago, we've barely managed to start rolling out IPv6 (I'd equate IPv4 to square rigging...), piracy will be around for quite awhile, but it will eventually be marginalized just Jean Lafitte and his like have been."

That was the single most foolish statement ever made on Slashdot.

Fixed that for you, you're easily topping it with:

The reason Sea "pirates" dont have a chance is because they dont have Trillions of dollars to have massive balttleships built and they typically are low IQ types. If they had any brains they would get their hands on some old WW-II submarines and utterly own the US navy. a WW-II torpedo will take out a US ship easily. We are just lucky that the pirates out there are simply opportunists that are nothing more than petty thieves and muggers of the sea.

On the internet, a 13 year old kid has as much technology and power as the entire US government has. This scares the shit out of the governments of the world and big business. Even after IPv8 has been in place for 20 years and quantum processors have been in the iPad 12 and iPhone 47 a 13 year old that has been studying technology and the internet will STILL have as much power as any government on this planet when on the internet.

The internet is nothing like the physical world where it takes a lot of money and resources to build something.

If WW-II submarines ever became a problem for the US Navy, how many hours do you think it would be before the Pentagon had a report on the location and capability of every WW-II submarine operating in the world? Do you think that one could surface and operate its diesel engines long enough to recharge the batteries before being spotted by satellite? How about refueling? And where do you get the torpedoes? Sure, anybody _could_ make a WW-II torpedo in an average warehouse space, but could you build a number of them and deliver them to the subs without being noticed? I find SPECTRE [wikipedia.org] more believable than your proposed fantasy.

200 years ago, Privateers were not exactly on-par with national navies, but they were a force to be reckoned with in individual encounters. Today, the kids on the internet are in a similar position with government intelligence agencies [irishcentral.com], but that's not a situation that's going to last for centuries - it might continue for 50 or 100 years, but eventually ideas like Echelon [wikipedia.org] will be workable, and deployed, and (more) effectively policing internet traffic, and, yes, they will take enormous resources to create and operate, resources unavailable to your average 13 year old suburbanite punk.

I think it's less about the distribution channel than it is about perception. Most people hold the belief that "straight to video" is a crap product. While this is typically true (I think) for STV movies released by the big studios*, it's certainly not true of a lot of the Indie/Foreign films out there.

Until/Unless the general population (which I think is also of the "I didn't go to the theater to 'read'" mentality) can get past needing a movie to be in a theater to validate that it's "good", using the Int

Movies don't make 'Profits', they all are made a loss after all the costs. That is why they try to get writers and actors to take 'monkey points' (net profit), like the dude who wrote Forest Gump, he never made any money off the movie because it never made a 'profit', even though it is in the top ten highest grossing movies at that time.

vodo.net is a nice distribution channel. One of their current projects is Pioneer One, a sci fi tv show that just finished its first season, now raising money for their 2nd.

Also, get yourself a copy of 'Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning', a Star Trek/Babylon 5 crossover parody still covered by fair use, until they pass enough laws to go after it. I've got a copy of it, it's free to distribute, and they have a website to contribute to so they can finance their next project.

Right, and there are artists doing exactly what is suggested there and making a lot of money doing it. The problem is they no longer need a record company to do it. The problem isn't that free access to music hurts musicians (it's actually very good for them) it's that the DISTRIBUTION of the music is now free... which used to be handled by the corporate music business. What's getting hurt are the corporate interests that used to control the distribution. For a while these businesses had them on their side, but the musicians are slowly starting to realize that for under $20k they can turn a room in their house and basically become their own label.

All of this is Good for music. Now we just need to find a way to kill Ticketmaster.

Every single time the pirates state.. "make it playable on what I want to play it on and a reasonable price."

that means 30 minute TV shows are $0.25 1 hour are $0.50 and Movies are $1.99

But the rampant obscene greed from the MPAA refuses to even think of that. Sorry, that TV show you broadcast free over public airwaves is NOT worth it to me to pay $1.99 to watch it on my apple TV or other device.

I'll even give you $5.99 for first run just out of theater for the first 4 weeks. But a 1985 movie that made it's money 10 times over? it had better be very very cheap for me to watch.

That is a very viable and REASONABLE alternative. it's just that the people with very low IQ's or are blinded by pure greed refuse to see it as a reasonable response.

Maybe there needs to be a market readjustment in the cost of movie making. Does spending a couple of weeks in front of a camera pretending to be someone else really justify a fee of several tens of millions of dollars? Does every assistant need an assistant? Do you really give everyone on your workforce their meals for free during a shoot?

And why spend at least $20 million on marketing? Every half-sucessful indie band knows how to sell themselves using the internet, for nothing more than the cost of their time. Much modern film marketing is redundant - for example, I don't want to see trailers that end up showing almost the whole plot of the movie - why would I bother going to see a film when you've just spent 5 minutes telling me exactly what's going to happen? Stop trying to force me to watch films in forced-stereoscopy "3D" - I won't pay extra just to be given a headache. Another lost sale. Why bother with promotional deals with fast-food outlets? Does getting a piece of plastic along with your burger really make you want to go and see the latest Transformers crap-fest? More wasted money.

Almost every other industry in the world is suffering from the financial climate. They are cutting costs in order to maintain profits. Why can't Hollywood do the same? The world has changed, and the studios' 20th century business model is obsolete.

Oh and do you think every indie band on the internet is trying pay all these peoples Salaries? What about the rest of those people? You think they don't have families and aren't hustling for work non stop in between jobs? And thats not an animated movie or VFX movie that are the MOST pirated.
This is all the people that aren't actors or producers for
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

This is a film which I have paid to see, bought on DVD and recommended to my friends (several of whom bought copies themselves). It was highly profitable, yet required only 12 people (plus cast) to make.

I agree that many people work on films that do not earn huge amounts of money. Cutting the fee of a leading actor by a few million dollars might actually mean that everyone else could get a pay rise - or is it right that the people who spend most time making a movie are paid only maybe 1/500th that of the person whose face is on the poster?

If Hollywood needs special laws made just to benefit its obsolete and inefficient business model, then it needs to change the way it does business, not change civil society to fit its needs.

Incidentally, you could have replied to my post with a single post of your own, and been less obnoxious about it. I'm polite - why aren't you?

Why do you think charging 1.99 will change anything? All piracy does it take money out of the hands of the crews that work on movies that work harder and longer hours then you I am guessing. It makes it harder to to get the content because they are not going to give up. If you dont' like what they provide then dont' watch it but now one can make the claim that they should get it all free cause they dont' like how they sell it. When did entertainment made others become a Human right? I want to know w

UMM those residuals pay for their retirements plans with the unions. Or you are anti union also? Don't think they should have those plans in place? If you think that then you are right. The should except Netflix and BlockBuster don't charge you $2-$5 do they.

I am not netflix. I cannot negotiate a multimillion dollar licensing deal as a compromise.

I am an ordinary consumer who would get shafted if I tried to get a private viewing license.

Take for instance, your typical blueray disc. This is a dumb storage medium that costs at most 50 cents to fabricate. (This includes screen printing the top, and all that jazz.) At market, this item, which the MPAA insists is a content license and not a physical sale item, costs on average 20 to 40$.

I can purchase a spool of blank bluray discs for that price. The cost is not the cost of distribution, therefor. (The spool of discs also has to be distributed.) Nor is it the price of marketing (the movie is old, and no longer being actively advertised). The majority of the cost is the price of the any-time home viewer content license.

Given that the disc is a digital medium, this is a digital distribution channel. Given that the cost of the disc is at most 50 cents, we must therefor conclude that the cost o a digital media license for a home consumer is around 20 to 40$.

Just how big of a pension plan do these geriatric camera and lighting crews drawing anyway? I'm a fucking aerospace engineer, designing parts for modern aircraft that will be in service for decades, and I don't get any pension plans. I don't feel I need one! I get reimbursed for my work on an hourly basis. After that, the product of my work belongs to my company. I don't magically have any rights to that product, and have no basis for demanding such remittance.

You know what people like me do for retirement?

Save our fucking money and plan for it. Like pretty much everyone else.

They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them.

Show movies on big screen for a price, or simply sell unrestricted movie files online.

Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap.

Yes. There's a lesson there.

But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.

Pretty much anything would be superior to their current tactic of making everyone hate their guts while simultaneously trying their level best to become the number one threat to Western culture.

Please. This kind of 24/7 "piracy is freedom fighting" crap tires me.

Maybe you should stop reading it, then?

He then ignores the fact that the easy and cheap rental services he asks for already exist (eg, iTunes, Netflix, Apple TV), and oddly enough, if both are as easy as he claims the free alternative will still always win.

As long as the Pirate Bay is the only place people can get movie files they can watch on any program and platform they want, are guaranteed to stay on their possession for as long as they - as opposed to a licensing server elsewhere - want, and can be worked on by tools to create new works - such as music videos - the Pirate Bay will always win. Freedom matters. Not to an authoritarian suggesting throwing mentally deficient people into jail over copyright infringement to stop them from "clogging up the Internet", of course, but it does matter to normal people.

The guy practically admits he breaks the law constantly and doesn't care, which isn't surprising because he has demonstrated the kind of reasoning skills I'd expect of a small child.

How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.

So you think he's clinically retarded yet you suggest throwing him into jail for copyright infringement, not because you think that stops this horrendous criminal behaviour but because you don't like something he wrote?

He doesn't ignore the existence of Netfix or iTunes at all, he champions them. And he's not arguing that anyone give everything away for free, he's arguing that a reasonable business model is the best way to counter the threat of piracy.

Kodak died because they didn't have the right culture to adapt to changing circumstances. They invented the first digital camera by a wide margin. They knew this was going to be 'a thing'. They just didn't know what to do with it, or how to go about it. The culture that builds a camera and optics meant to last decades is not automatically the best culture to spin off digital camera with ever-increasing feature on a planned obsolescence schedule. They were perfectionists who could not get out from under thei

How about worldwide release for a fair price...In cinemas that aren't overpriced and filthy...On optical discs that aren't encumbered with DRM schemes and can be played anywhere...For download in an open format which is also not encumbered by DRM...

Sure, some people will still pirate but many more won't... The pirates will no longer be offering a superior service, they will be considerably less convenient and only marginally cheaper.

Currently the movie industry treats its customers with utter contempt, subjecting them to drm schemes, region restrictions... Many people are strongly against supporting organisations who treat them this way.

You could also start paying actors a more realistic wage relative to the amount of work they do, quite often behind the scenes staff work for far longer and far harder to produce a movie and yet they get paid a pittance compared to the big name actors.

You could also start paying actors a more realistic wage relative to the amount of work they do, quite often behind the scenes staff work for far longer and far harder to produce a movie and yet they get paid a pittance compared to the big name actors.

That's called what the market will bear.

While I will agree that Frank behind the scenes may work much longer hours building the sets than Eva Mendes spends acting on them.... I don't want to see Frank's man tits. You do the math.

They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them. Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap. But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.

Never heard of merchandising? Hollywood makes as much through merchandising as they do from the movie itself. Wanna know why that Mickey Mouse tshirt costs 30 bucks and a parody tshirt costs 10 bucks? The licensing fee per shirt the manufacture has to pay to Disney. It costs what, 25 cents to make that Transformer lunch box. Why's it cost 29.99 in the store? Licensing costs to the studio. This business model has been around for a long time. Back in the 60's when I was a kid, the big thing was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the show was a bigassed hit, and the stores were filled with the lunch boxes, the toy guns, the posters, everything. The studio made a killing on that shit, and you can get big bucks for a lunchbox on eBay.

Point being: some things simply aren't setup well for merchandising. Merchandising - while it might bring in some money - it probably isn't going to bring in enough profit to pay for the upfront costs of making the digital media in the first place. Yeah, you can talk about merchandising, but how about if you name the top 100 movies and 100 software packages and then explain how they'll earn back their investment with merchandising. Sure, a movie Transformers *might* have a possibility of earning some money back from increased sales of Transformers toys (though I doubt that even they could earn enough to pay for the film), what about the "English Patient"? Even if you talk about massive markups (from $0.25 to make a lunch box to a cost of $30, which I'm sure both numbers are wrong) you still have to sell a huge number of them to make a decent profit. Avatar cost $400 million for production and marketing. How many Avatar lunchboxes do you have to sell again, to earn back that $400 million investment? Even if I accepted your "$29.75 of profit on ever lunchbox" claim (which I don't believe), you'd have to sell 13.5 million lunchboxes to earn $400 million. Given 310 million Americans, that's roughly 4.5 million Americans at each age. So, if you can sell an Avatar lunchbox to *every single 9, 10 , and 11 year-old* in the United States, then you can fund the movie budget.

Heck, even movies like Cloverfield or Avatar aren't going to be making much from merch. If they could be making money from merchandise, they'd already be doing it because every movie producer is going to jump at an opportunity that could bring in a few million dollars (which, by the way, is a small fraction of movie budgets).

Kodak died because it was an American firm. They weren't changing direction because they were driving their business quarter by quarter. Fuji was in exactly the same boat, but they're Japanese, so they could change. And they did.

It doesn't take a lot of money to make a good film, unless you're trying to do tons of special effects.

There are a lot of stories that can't be told without "tons of special effects".

All you need are people willing to work together.

Which requires a way of paying these people. Good luck demonstrating a way to fund a feature film outside the copyright system. You might point to the Blender shorts, but they haven't made anything feature-length yet. I enjoyed Big Buck Bunny; now where's something longer like Ice Age? I've seen Sintel; now where's the next How to Train Your Dragon?

Neil Young had a pretty interesting observation recently that P2P filesharing is the new radio. His chief complaint is that the sound quality of the music is rather bad. I realize he's sitting at the tail end of his career and probably doesn't give much of a shit any more, and he's had enough battles with record companies in his time that I doubt they provoke much sympathy from him, but I think it shows that sometimes things can appear quite different depending on your perspective. If you're looking at The

The article actually said something intelligent. The products are way overpriced. Think about it. Who rips movies with a video capture card from Netflix using the analog hole on the Wii? Not worth the effort.

Who scans the entire daily local newspaper and posts it on a torrent site so their buddies don't have to buy their own copy?

Why is there piracy? The product is overpriced making the effort worth the trouble. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

I have Netflix, A VCR/DVD combo recorder, a Wii providing the analog hole, but I don't bother to burn content from Netflix simply because there is plenty of search-able readily accessible content on Netflix. If each movie was instead a $4.95 pay per view rental, I would be much more inclined to choose a much smaller pool of choices and record them so I don't have to rent it again to catch the part I missed with a phone call or other interruption.

Summary;Overpriced content makes the effort worth it. Low prices and large selection negate the desire to collect and archive the product. Lets face it, Have you kept a physical copy of every newspaper you ever bought? Why. Did you exercise your right of first sale and sell collections by season? Why or why not?

Unless you are talking about ships, I cannot really agree with you here. Copyright was designed when specialized industrial equipment was required to make large numbers of accurate copies of creative works. That is not the situation today; today, everyone has such equipment in their homes. We should be completely rethinking the law because it is absurd to tell people not to copy things using their own computers.

A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.

A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.

Many of my friends who direct and produce have absolutely been giving serious consideration to these other funding models:

- A friend of mine from school produced an entire very well-made scifi short [scificool.com] many years ago, funding it with donations on his website, long before Kickstarter even existed. It's a great short and he got a lot of attention, and it won a lot of awards at several festivals. Aside from producing another friends feature, however, Jason's paying gig remains an editor-for-hire on E! cable shows of the "100 Craziest celebrity moments" variety. If he wasn't making money from those he would never have been able to complete his short; he was able to raise money to just make the thing with friends, and nowhere near enough to pay himself for the time it took to develop and produce the project, or pay anyone their actual market wages.

- Another friend of mine [daniellelurie.com] has been raising money for her project [indiegogo.com] for several years now on IndieGoGo. Several years now. Luckily she has means and is able to supplement her income with writing gigs on Big Hollywood Movies.

Basically none of the proposed funding models work without either (1) Hollywood paying everybody the 10 months out of the year people aren't working on their crowdsourced project or (2) abandoning the concept of the professional artist. As I said in another post, your median open source developer doesn't live on donations, they make their money at day jobs working for Evil Corporations that Sue People for infringing IP. Open source is a "marginal time" activity, it doesn't satisfy material needs. Open content is only so far a complement to the copyright model, it can't replace it.

Crowd sourced funding promises a lot of things: the idea that people will reward good work with more money, or that new work that is "suppressed" by the old system will emerge. In practice, however, these things haven't materialized and I don't think they ever will, I just don't think entertainment works that way. People want a casual experience they can take or leave, they don't want their entertainment experience turned into an advocacy enterprise where they have to band together with people and raise money and attract friend networks and go through all this bullshit just to see 20 minutes of mumblecore.

Kill copyright and you threaten to kill everything that stands on top of it, like a lot of open source software developers, and any artist that isn't willing to whore himself out to rich patrons. That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was. With copyright everyone gets a say in who is rewarded, and they vote with their pocketbooks. Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize this.

You're right. It is stupid for millions of people who don't create anything and who have no understanding of creation, production, and covering the costs thereof, to think that ripping off the very people they want creating things for them is sustainable. The sickness is in the sense of entitlement on the consuming side, not the production side. Throw out the extreme outliers on both sides, anecdote-and-attitude-wise, and that fundamental truth is still... true.

Firstly, Pioneer One is a very low production value show, I don't think it'd even be picked up by an American syndicator.

Secondly, it's just not sustainable-- they've managed to make 6 episodes over two years, god knows what they're all doing to feed themselves when they aren't shooting an ep; probably going back down to Manhattan and working paying gigs in the old media. We don't expect most developers to live off donations, the best ones that do have a good paying day job developing; why would we expect f

You argument is based on an assumption that there isn't a valid alternative to mindlessly attempting to stamp out piracy and wrecking a whole bunch of stuff in the process (eg. the internet). The article sets out perfectly clearly what the alternative is.

"Let's stop protecting all our crops from pests and thieves and see how that turns out." - invalid comparison as it is possible to protect crops from pests and thieves. Not 100%, perhaps, but certainly enough to allow the production of crops to be a viable

That's not the point, though. The point is the same that says that stricter, more severe laws will not end crime. More driving restrictions will not end all traffic accidents. A more policing will probably have an impact on crime, but citizen's rights will often be trampled in the process (think TSA). If you forbid going more than 10mph on highways, you might reduce accidents, but at the cost of sacrificing the whole point of using the infrastructure - fast travel. Prohibition and excessive regulation are b

I don't have a massive problem with piracy either. In fact I perhaps would have switched to piracy exclusively by now if Spotify weren't more convenient. The record labels have been amazingly hypocritical in their attitude towards copyright, and their treatment of artists.

But "because you'll never stop some people being douchebags" is the worst argument against copyright I've heard.

And I hope for his own sake that he manages to keep anonymous, as the pro-piracy activists play really dirty, possibly worse than the anti-piracy lobby which at least mostly sticks to the legal channels.

Hmm. Pro-piracy activists, worst case: Illegally access your computers and make you look like a fool on the Internet. Anti-piracy lobby: Put you in prison for 5 years, bankrupt you, and leave you unable to make a living once you get out (thanks to that felony conviction -- good luck getting the AIDS drugs for the case you picked up in prison). All legal. Still think the pro-piracy activists are worse?

And nothing happens. While I commend the writer for articulating what is wrong with the current movie industry model, the reality is that Hollywood is hell bent on preserving their business model. For good reason too, most of Hollywood are distributors. The distributors are the ones that pay for the movie, the marketing, and shoving it down the throats of consumers. They're middle men protecting their business. Change the distribution model and you'll hear the sucking sound of Hollywood companies drying up. Studios aren't strapped with tons of cash to pay for hit movies on their own, so you'll have fewer movies being made. No one in Hollywood has any incentive to change the current model, and unlike the music industry that got dragged into the 21st century, or the game industry that has adapted to every new platform to survive, the movie industry consumers lack any desire to force a business model change or adaption. Tthe closest thing to adaption is Netflix and recent price hikes are an indicator that the distributors will kill it before giving the consumers what they want.

And on top of that: why would they change? It's not as if their business model doesn't work anymore. I'd argue it works very well. Just look at the money that's made in Hollywood, it doesn't seem like they're having a hard time making ends meet or so.

The Walt Disney Company is entitled to be recompensed for Tangled, I'll grant for a moment. But why should it be entitled to be recompensed for decades-old short films like Plane Crazy, The Gallopin' Gaucho, and Steamboat Willie, the original Mickey Mouse trilogy? And why should it be entitled to be recompensed for movies that it chooses not to make available at all, such as Song of the South? And why shouldn't the Shakespeare estate (or the estate of some earl [wikipedia.org] according to some looney [wikipedia.org]) be entitled to be recompensed for performances of Romeo and Juliet?

...it is that tremendous progress has been made in the field of anonymous file sharing technology. If the folks from the music/movie industry hadn't pushed so hard to prevent piracy, we would still be on Napster. But instead we now have very advanced things like the BitTorrent protocol, equipped with encryption, magnet links, DHT and PEX. And it's not just the geeks who are using these advanced file sharing technologies either, it's ordinary people. All in all quite an achievement.

Sure, they will never make it so that it is completely impossible for a few people to do.But they have more then enough lobbying power to make the consequences of being caught so severe and the internet so monitored that piracy is so underground that 99% cannot find it and would not take the risk if they did.

It might not help their profit margin to do this as much as they think, but they are mega corporations and they at least have a chance at doing whatever they want.While they might not be able to do so in any reasonably free and fair society or under current US law, but that will not necessarily stop them.Hell, I would not bet against them if they launched a coup to physically take over the government and impose a tyranny in the US and put the current administrations heads on spikes outside of the whitehouse.

Load up every movie you've got on a drive. Tell a friend to buy one of them new fangled terabyte drives - that's what? $69 at Best Buy? Then connect your drive to his computer and drive. Click and drag contents from your drive to his and vice versa. Crack a bottle or two of wine, hang out, have a great afternoon and soon, you have more movies and shows than you could plausibly watch in years.

It was called Sneakernet back in the day. There's rumblings about a new kind of "Alexandrian" (i.e. universal) Library - only this time it's totally decentralised and offline and untraceable. How that can pan out, god only knows, but it's the logical conclusion to the graspings of the **AA, the pathetically corrupt governments, and the increasingly policed and threatened internet.

It used to be "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks." Now it's "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with hard drives..."

Studios live on a strong distribution model where they control the vast majority of the content and the distribution channels. Any tool that is viable for "piracy" is also viable by independent distributors as well. While I don't condone copyright infringement I think studios are more interested in their long term viability than to protect their content from "piracy". I expect similar behavior from the major publishing houses in the next couple of years as ebooks break their hold on the distribution channels.

And the book publishers will screw themselves too. Look at Baen publishing. They have embraced DRM free ebook publishing and profited. They also make lots of their author's older books available for free at their website. Strangely they have continued to thrive.

We have been saying this from within the industry for 5 years. Why are we paying truck drivers to haul blu-rays to store shelves when we could be using the internet to deliver the movies for 1/100th the cost? Not only is putting a blu-ray on a store shelf inherently risky (essentially a master copy of the movie) but it costs MONEY to produce, deliver, and manage, Make the movies cheap, remove DRM, use the technology to help figure out where the movies are going so that you can optimally sell merchandise... seems like a winner to me and to many others but apparently not to the people in charge.

That's because the majority of their sales come from people who would rather own a physical copy of the movie (or at least the permission to watch it) than view it over the internet or copy it. This, and most people who compulsively collect cheap worthless crap due to razzle dazzle marketing probably don't have big incomes or credit cards to use on the internet, and at least want the item on a shelf as some kind of lower middle class status symbol. All this is worth the overhead of distribution.

In a growing number of cases, the making-of documentary, back-story information, deleted scenes, anamorphic transfer, and the like are available only in the purchased DVD, not the cut-down DVD marked "RENTAL" that Netflix and Redbox get.

Unless your going to watch everything five or more times this makes much more sense.

And guess how often single-digit-year-old children will watch a given animated movie published by Disney.

Why are we paying truck drivers to haul blu-rays to store shelves when we could be using the internet to deliver the movies for 1/100th the cost?

Two reason, the first is that people still seem to prefer to either own or rent a physical copy. The second is because Joe's Corner Mom & Pop isn't going to invest the thousands of dollar it's going to take to set up a burner, printer, and shrink wrap system and then spend the money to stock up on blank media, decent printer stock, and empty cases/jewel boxes and *then* pay someone to burn, print, and wrap in order to make a buck (or less) a copy. Hollywood and the entertainment industry would love to push all those capital and operating expenses off their own bottom line - but they know they'll face a revolution.

Not only is putting a blu-ray on a store shelf inherently risky (essentially a master copy of the movie) but it costs MONEY to produce, deliver, and manage.

This is why those in charge aren't listening to you - you're talking nonsense. How is putting a physical master copy risky... but a virtual master isn't? Not to mention that virtual delivery isn't exactly free either - servers, bandwidth, and the bodies to maintain and manage them aren't cheap.

The op ed is missing one quite critical point. The movie industries aren't sitting here fighting piracy because they don't know the way forward. They don't sit there because they are dinosaurs and luddites who have no idea how technology works.

They sit in their 1990s era thinking because despite everything which is changed, and everything which is conspiring against them from the modern age piracy front they are making money. No actually I take that back. They are making a SHITLOAD of money. When you have a magic machine that spits out $100 bills why tinker with it at all? Until the bills stop coming out why mess with it? Someone opposes the machine, don't adapt your machine to them, attempt to crush them.

It's all good an fine to sit here and claim they are dinosaurs for not getting with the times, but lets face it, the vast majority of us would do anything to maintain our status quo, if that status quo involved having a butter polish your shoes using the face of Benjamin Franklin.

Most piracy is based on poorly implemented encryption due to slow processors. Next Gen hardware will be able to run encryption algorithms that don't have a gazillion assembly optimization in them. The XBox, PS3, current gen TVs & Blu Ray players couldn't. Once that happens, pop. No more piracy.

We are making the mistake that many losers in many conflicts have made: We think our enemy is stupid and not seing the obvious.

What if they are?

Imagine that Hollywood is as smart as us and knows everything we know. And still they are doing what they are doing. Why would it make sense?

One, it gives them time. They may know they need to change business models, but like all humans, they are risk-averse and they need time to adapt, to test out various strategies, to find the most profitable approach. At the same time, they want their revenue to continue coming in. Delaying the inevitable is sometimes a smart move, if you can use the time inbetween.

Two, making everything else illegal guarantees that they can take down the competition before it emerges. Many of the illegal online services like Napster or Megaupload were toying with the idea of going legit, because they realized that you can only get so big and so much exposure before the guys with the guns come knocking. A legal service that competes with the studios (instead of working with them, like iTunes) could emerge out of those. Can't have that, better to shut it down while it's still clearly on the illegal side.

There are probably more good reasons. Don't assume they are stupid without proof.

I'll give you a third reason: to stay relevant. The RIAA and the MPAA know and have known for a long time that the Internet and the widespread availability of computers are a death sentence for their industries. Copyrights just do not work when consumer electronics can make large numbers of perfect copies of any data, and without copyrights the RIAA and MPAA have no business model at all.

What they want is for computers to be consumption-only devices, and for the Internet to be a fancy broadcasting system. Everything they have been pushing for over the past 15 years is designed to chip away at the P2P nature of Internet communications and to put consumers back in their place. There is a grand strategy at work: kill the Internet, rebuild it as a fancy cable TV system.

Specifically, I think you're overestimating their ability to change. It is famously difficult to turn around a huge company, particularly when their entire business model is vanishing before their eyes. Only a few have succeeded - Apple and IBM are some of the best-known tech examples.

More often, the company comes close to collapse. See also Polaroid and Kodak.

Why? Simple. The bigger the company, the harder it is to make big changes to how it operates. You've

The other advantage of this model suggested in the article is that it opens up the demographic again.

Currently, there's generally pretty much only two types of movies being made: 1. big studio movies that get general release and are deliberately targeted at the average under 25's (big, loud, dumb, and 3d where possible) -- this being the only significant viable cinema-going audience, and 2. niche art house movies that are only designed to appeal to movie students, critics, film buffs, and the clinically depressed.

These are the only two viable production models under the current distribution system. If you are over 25 and don't really want to watch some angst-ridden, slow, dreary, politically-correct, mirror on society, nobody is making movies you want to see right now.

Say, for example, a movie like the Sand Pebbles. That movie would be impossible to make in the current market. Unless you either, slashed the budget so it took place in a few rooms, or if you cast Shia LeDouche, Mila Kunis and had lots of car chases in 3d in it. There's no way a movie will make any money at all unless it's either mass appeal, or funded by some European government socialist film fund. We will never see another Sand Pebbles, nor 2001 A Space Oddysey, nor anything by Robert Altman, nor any similar movie, under the current system.

However, if you broadened the distribution system away from cinemas and DVDs, it is possible to target adults again, and release an whole range of genres. It would be like the late 60's and 70's where big-name directors and big stars could experiment, and produce art that was also extremely entertaining (rather than dreary and narcissistic, like the current art house crap).

If only Hollywood would learn to move with the times and adapt instead of stubbornly trying to cling to the past. Back in the day, the MPAA fought tooth and nail against consumer video decks considering them the death knell of the industry. When they finally accepted that video decks were here to stay, they adapted and home video became a major source of profit for them.

Now the industry is fighting once again against the internet. Another pointless battle. They need to learn to adapt and incorporate the internet into their business model rather than continuing this losing battle.

Given the choice, most consumers will go the easiest, most convenient route to the content in the format they would like. Netflix streaming has taken off like gangbusters because it's relatively inexpensive and very convenient. Make it easy and inexpensive and most people will not pirate your content! It's far, far easier for the regular consumer to just go to a Netflix type site than to find and download a torrent client, navigate through Pirate Bay, wait for the torrent to download, and hope they don't get plagued with viruses.

People like the convenience of watching movies via the internet. That ain't gonna change. Hollywood needs to embrace the internet and make their libraries available via Netflix like services. Until then, people will continue to follow the easiest path to get the movies they want to watch in the format they want to watch them.

The music industry has an even worse problem. Historically, musicians were nobodies - servants and worse. Only during the period when the economics of one to many record manufacturing turned some musicians into "brands" was it a big-money business. Today anybody can make a recording, and the only edge the remaining record companies have is marketing and a back catalog. Billboard points out [billboard.com] that the top-grossing band of 2011, Bon Jovi, made 90% of their money touring. Those are the economics of a top performer in the era of Edison wax cylinder recording.

The trick in the future is going to be figuring out you can get as big enough that you can live off the proceeds of touring. Top tie regional artists can usually do well enough to pay the bills, but much below that at it rapidly becomes more of a hobby than an occupation.

Let's face it, to a large extent the musical superstar is a creation of the whole record company machine. I'm dubious that you could have big acts like Frank Sinatra or Elvis or Pink Floyd without the business model that the record companie

Top tie regional artists can usually do well enough to pay the bills, but much below that at it rapidly becomes more of a hobby than an occupation.

Most glamor jobs are like that. If you've spent any time in LA, you've encountered the actress/model/waitress types. The average acting income of a SAG member is a few thousand a year. Modeling is worse; below the top 100 or so supermodels, nobody is making enough to buy a house.

Neither, actually. The truth is that for all the noise, piracy hasn't hurt the movie industry in any demonstrable way (best three box office years in history? 2009, 2010, and 2011, despite record piracy and a bad economy.) However, they can use it as a pretense to maintain/raise prices in the face of falling costs, and as a scare tactic to push through advantageous legislation. There is no reason for them to actually want to win this war - they are making far more money "fighting" it than they would gain if it stopped.

He also rationalizes that downloading is okay because it's not like you actually stole a physical object - so it's not really stealing, right?

One of these things is not like the other:

I steal your car. Now you do not have a car.

I copy your music. Now we both have music.

Which is why we charge people with theft, rather than copyright infringement. Calling it "theft" is meant to shut down an argument against the copyright system, by equating a copyright with a form of property ownership. Copyright has never been a type of property, it exists only to benefit the public, and at this point it is not clear that copyright is the best way to ensure the public's access to art and science.

People are not going to stop using their computers to copy things; we need to accept that and move on. If we really want to save copyright as a system, then we need to punish violations the same way we punish parking violations: a small but annoying fine for each violation. Gone are the days when only people with specialized industrial equipment could possibly commit copyright infringement; the law was not designed to deal with mass numbers of people having copying equipment in their homes. If we are not talking about updating the law, then we are having the wrong conversation.

Personally, I think the whole copyright system should be scrapped, and the industries that were built on copyrights should either adapt to the new world and its new technology or die like other out of date industries. We should be using the Internet to ensure that creative work is never lost, that it never goes out of print, that it is never buried as part of an effort to maintain a corporate image, etc. A lot of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists; why are we not giving any of them any consideration?

One of these things is not like the other:
I steal your car. Now you do not have a car.
I copy your music. Now we both have music.

Suppose you decide to sell tickets to a concert. But I tell perspective ticket buyers that I can open the basement door and let them in for free. In the end you only sell 1/4 the number of tickets you would have if I hadn't let most of the fans in for free. I didn't harm you? You lost your shirt because you weren't paid for the work and costs you incurred, but the concert still went on, right? [wikipedia.org]

And no one rational says it is. But even though you can't stop rape and murder you only punish the culprits, not the taxi driver that gave them a ride. Not the guy that rents them an apartment. Not the store that sold them a butcher knife. You don't make everyone wear a RFID tag and track them 24/7. You don't put cameras in every room of every house. No, what you do is you catch the culprits and punish them. The problem with the anti-piracy people is that they seem to think it's okay to take away eve

According to the opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the opportunity for fair use is one of the few things keeping copyright from violating the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press. Legal protections for any watermarking scheme that outright prevents fair use copying might result in a successful challenge on constitutional grounds.

I don't want to out her here without asking her, but she has pretty much seen her ability to survive as a musician destroyed. She was never getting rich, but 5 thousand CDs sold *at least* paid for the time and money spent to make them. Now they are selling a couple hundred and everyone else gets it free.

You're making the same false assumption the RIAA is. If she's been doing it since the eighties, her audience is now in their forties. Most middle aged people don't buy a lot of music, and the younger gener